A culture that’s ready for a different kind of closeup

It’s telling that Manuel Betancourt’s new e book, “Hiya Stranger: Musings on Trendy Intimacies,” grounded in queer principle and abolition, takes its title from a line from the 2004 movie “Nearer,” about two messed-up straight {couples}.

The selection of “Nearer,” “a bruising piece concerning the rotting roteness of long-term intimacy,” as Betancourt places it, is an expertise acquainted to many. 2024 was a yr through which marriage, particularly heterosexual marriage, was taken to activity. Miranda July’s most recent novel, “All Fours”; Sarah Manguso’s scathing novel “Liars”; nonfiction accounts equivalent to Lyz Lenz’s “This American Ex-Wife”; Amanda Montei’s “Touched Out”; and even the late entry of Halina Reijn’s film “Babygirl” all present that, on the very least, girls are unhappy with heterosexual marriage, and that some are being destroyed by it.

The straight male expertise of sexual promiscuity and journey is nothing new. It has been nicely trod in novels by writers equivalent to John Updike and Philip Roth and extra lately, Michel Houellebecq. In cinema there are erotic thrillers — suppose “Primary Intuition,” “Deadly Attraction,” “Eyes Large Shut” — through which males are the playboys and girls the collateral injury. Betancourt tells us that “Hiya Stranger” begins in “a spot the place I’ve lengthy purloined a lot of my most head-spinning obsessions: the flicks.” However this e book isn’t interested by gender, or heterosexuality. It’s an embrace of what makes us human, and the methods through which we keep away from “making contact.” Betancourt desires to indicate that the best way we relate to others typically tells us “extra crucially” how we relate “to ourselves.”

By chapters targeted on cinematic tropes such because the “meet cute” (“A stranger is all the time a starting. A potential starting,” Betancourt writes) and investigations of sexting, cruising, friendship, and coupling and throupling, “Hiya Stranger” is a assured compendium of queer principle by means of the lens of popular culture, navigating these points by means of the work of writers and artists together with Frank O’Hara, Michel Foucault and David Wojnarowicz, with tales from Betancourt’s personal private expertise.

In a dialogue of the discretion wanted for long-term relationships, Betancourt displays: “One is about privateness. The opposite is about secrecy. The previous feels crucial inside any wholesome relationship; the latter can’t assist however chip away on the belief wanted for a stable basis.” Within the chapter on cruising, he explores how a apply related to pursuit of intercourse could be a mannequin for all times outdoors the construction of heteropatriarchy: “Making a queer world has required the event of sorts of intimacy that bear no crucial relation to home area, to kinship, to the couple kind, to property, or to the nation.”

The chapters on cruising and on friendship (“Shut Buddies”) are the strongest of the e book, although “Bare Buddies” features a pleasant revisitation of Rose’s erotic awakening in “Titanic.” Betancourt makes use of the historical past of the friendship, and its “queer elasticity” utilizing Foucault’s imagining of friendship between two males (“What would permit them to speak? They face one another with out phrases or handy phrases, with nothing to guarantee them concerning the that means of the motion that carries them towards one another.”) to delve into Hanya Yanagihara’s wildly profitable novel, “A Little Life.” He quotes Yanagihara, who echoes Foucault when she says that “her curiosity in male friendships needed to do with the restricted emotional vocabulary males (no matter their race, cultural affiliations, faith, or sexuality—and her protagonists do run the gamut in these regards) have.”

Betancourt thinks concerning the suffocating actuality of monogamy by means of Richard Yates’ devastating novel of home tragedy “Revolutionary Street” (and Sam Mendes’ later movie adaptation), mentioning that marriage “forces you to reside with an ever-present witness.” In writing about infidelity, he explores Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Firm” and quotes Mary Steichen Calderone, former head of Intercourse Data and Schooling Council of america, in her analysis on adults who interact in extramarital affairs: “They’re rebelling towards the loneliness of the city nuclear household, through which a mom, a father and some kids have just one one other for emotional assist. Maybe society is attempting to reorganize itself to fulfill these yearnings.” These revelations are essential to Betancourt’s argument — certainly one of abolition and freedom — that recall to mind the work of queer theorists just like the late Lauren Berlant and José Esteban Muñoz.

Betancourt in the end involves the conclusion popularized by the author Bell Hooks, which is that amid any dialogue of id comes the simple: our humanity. He quotes Hooks’ citation of the author Frank Browning on eroticism: “By erotic, I imply all of the highly effective points of interest we’d have: for mentoring and being mentored, for unrealizable flirtation, for mental tripping, for sweaty mateship at play or at work, for religious ecstasy, for being held in silent grief, for explosive rage at a typical enemy, for the chic love of friendship.” There’s an entire world outdoors the inflexible buildings we’ve come to take as necessities for residing.

“Hiya Stranger” is a energetic and clever addition to a necessary discourse on how not solely accessing our needs but additionally being open about them could make us extra human, and maybe, make for a greater world. “There may presumably be a option to fold these urges into their very own relationship,” Betancourt writes. “They might construct a special sort of two that will permit them to discover a wholeness inside and outdoors themselves with out resorting to such betrayals, such lies, such affairs.” It’s the embrace of that complexity that, Betancourt suggests, offers folks one other option to reside.

When requested how he may write with such honesty concerning the danger of promiscuity through the AIDS epidemic, the author Douglas Crimp responded: “As a result of I’m human.” “Hiya Stranger” proves that artwork, as Crimp stated, “challenges not solely our sense of the world, however of who we’re in relation to the world … and of who we’re in relation to ourselves.”

Jessica Ferri is the proprietor of Womb Home Books and the writer, most lately, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”